GETTY CURSE
Guns, cocaine and death at 47 — the latest member of the billionaire oil family to prove that money doesn’t buy happiness
THE body of Andrew Getty, naked from the waist down, was discovered in a bathroom at his gated, three-storey £2.6 million villa in the Hollywood Hills on Tuesday afternoon. The Los Angeles neighbourhood is home to many of Tinseltown’s most powerful players, but Getty’s surname was all that was needed to ensure his entry into that social set. The 47-year-old grandson of John Paul Getty, once the world’s richest man, Andrew was an heir to the vast Getty oil fortune.
Lurid early reports of his death and troubled past suggest a new chapter has opened in the tragic history of a family that epitomises, like no other, the saying that money doesn’t bring you happiness.
John Paul Getty, a misanthrope so tight-fisted he put a payphone in the hall of his Surrey mansion, failed disastrously in his quest to prevent his huge fortune spoiling his heirs. A string of Gettys have died from drug overdoses, while another grandson of the family patriarch, Jean Paul Getty III, never recovered after he became the victim of a notorious and brutal kidnapping.
Other members of the supremely dysfunctional family became embroiled in decades long lawsuits and divorces, always over money.
Even Andrew’s father, Gordon, a supposedly squeaky- clean married philanthropist and classical composer, was mired in scandal when it emerged he had a secret second family.
In this latest tragedy, police say a woman called them to Andrew Getty’s home on Tuesday, saying that the horror movie buff had suffered a heart attack.
Investigators say he had been having severe stomach problems and suffered significant bleeding in his rectal area. However, they believe he died of natural causes or an accident.
Andrew Getty’s former girlfriend, identified in the U.S. media as aspiring actress Lanessa De Jonge, 32, raised the alarm. Reportedly she had told him to see a doctor about ‘painful bowel movements’.
Though investigators do not regard her as a suspect, she allegedly has a history of psychiatric problems and has been arrested a number of times for harassment and disorderly conduct.
Reports in America suggest that according to police insiders, officers had previously been called to the house 31 times, usually over domestic disturbances. Lanessa and Andrew were frequently under the influence of drugs when officers visited.
Then two weeks ago, Getty took out a restraining order against her, the Los Angeles police said yesterday.
AT THE same time as he took out the order, he said he had a serious medical condition and that doctors had warned him that ‘ heated arguments can cause my blood pressure to rise dangerously’, putting him at ‘serious risk’.
Twelve years ago, when Getty was being sued over a disagreement with a former employee, he was portrayed in court by ex-colleagues on a film he directed as a threatening, cocainesnorting gun nut.
Educated at the private Dunn School in California, he later studied at New York University and the University of Southern California. Intriguingly, records show he has been prosecuted 12 times for unpaid taxes.
Andrew was the second eldest of four sons of Gordon Getty by his publisher wife, Ann. Gordon was the fourth son of the family patriarch J. Paul Getty, yet still Gordon assumed control of the $4billion family trust when his father died in 1976. J. Paul Getty married five times and produced six children, whom he treated with such disdain he never even bothered to attend their weddings.
He became the world’s richest man when he struck oil in the Middle East in 1953. He reportedly showed affection for his youngest son, Timmy. But when he died aged 12 from a brain tumour, his father didn’t go to his funeral.
Timmy’s mother claimed the tycoon had even complained about paying for his son’s medical treatment.
His other sons fared little better. His eldest son and heir apparent, George, worked himself into an early grave trying to impress his father in the family business.
He became so despairing at his failure that he would stab himself in the arms with a letter opener. He turned to drink and drugs, and died in 1973 after overdosing on pills.
J. Paul Getty’s second son, Ronald, was virtually disinherited after his mother Adolphine — Getty’s third wife — dared to drag her feet over a divorce when the tycoon decided to move on to wife number four.
John Paul Junior, the third boy, has gone down in history as the prodigal son. After a first job earning $100 a month as a petrol pump attendant, he joined the family business, but took to drinking heavily.
He became a heroin addict soon after meeting his beautiful second wife, the Dutch actress and socialite Talitha Pol. They became darlings of the celebrity hippie set, partying with Mick Jagger and spending most of the Sixties in a druggie haze.
When Talitha died of a heroin overdose in 1971, a devastated John Paul Junior holed himself up in his home in England. Unsurprisingly, he was cut off financially by his father, who intoned: ‘No Getty can be a drug addict.’
The shortage of funds proved tragic in 1973 when John Paul Junior’s oldest child, John Paul III, 16, was kidnapped in Rome by the Mafia.
When a $17million ransom demand arrived, his skinflint grandfather refused to help. It was only after one of
the boy’s ears was sent through the post that Getty coughed up and the hostage was released.
Traumatised by his ordeal, the young John Paul Getty III slipped into cocaine and heroin addiction, washed down with a bottle of bourbon a day.
In 1981, he suffered catastrophic liver failure and a severe stroke, emerging from six weeks in a coma virtually blind and paralysed from the neck down. He could communicate by little more than a high-pitched scream. He died aged 54 in 2011.
Until now, Andrew Getty’s side of the family lived largely in comparative obscurity. After inheriting the family business empire, his father Gordon sold Getty Oil to Texaco for $10 billion in the mid-Eighties.
He then settled in San Francisco to devote his life to philanthropy and his real passion: writing classical music.
However, in 1999, he, too, plunged the Getty name into controversy after three previously secret children — then aged eight, ten and 14 — went to court to change their name to Getty.
They and their mother, Cynthia Beck, it emerged, had been Gordon’s secret second family in Los Angeles, and the girls had decided to claim their birthright. His wife, Ann, had been aware for two years about the other family.
GORDON and Ann’s second son, Andrew, meanwhile, had been trying with little success to become a film director. In 2003, Andrew was sued by a studio assistant, Ingrid Jacobs, for £ 500 in unpaid wages for his first and only film, a horror movie made in the house where he died this week.
The court heard how Getty snorted cocaine, spent heavily on prostitutes and carried a gun — keeping an arsenal of assault rifles at his home and threatening the film crew with them.
‘All of us lived in fear of his dark, violent moods,’ said Ms Jacobs in court.
‘He once screamed at me: “I’m going to kick you in the kidneys so hard that you choke.”
‘He had no worries about spending thousands a week on high- price prostitutes, but he was mean as hell with everyone else.’
Charity Thomson, the movie’s assistant director, said she saw Getty snorting drugs while on the set. She described him as ‘a spoilt rich kid who doesn’t value his own life or that of anyone else’.
Money never bought the family patriach J. Paul Getty love, a fact he belatedly acknowledged when he said he would have given half his kingdom for a happy marriage.
Now, with another troubled Getty life cut short, his family would no doubt agree the money that brought them such luxury has also brought seemingly endless misery.
As one commentator said: ‘ They were born with golden ladles in their mouths, and they choked on them.’